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Plasma Active - a New Approach to Tablet Computing

Why would you spend a few hundred dollars on a device that is little
more than a smartphone (with a bigger screen, without the phone)?

Despite the success of Apple's iPad, that is a question that seems to have
defeated most hardware and software vendors. MeeGo struggled to define a
tablet user interface, never quite managing more than a pre-release. It
presented a few simple options, such as watching videos, playing music
or browsing the Web—really no more than a modern phone with a larger
screen. Even the iPad, an acknowledged success, is little more than an
oversize iPhone. Its "wall of apps" approach has been largely copied by
the Android-based tablets so far appearing on the market.

What Are Tablets For?

The tablet sitting in your hand (or unused in one of your drawers) is a
real computer. Can it do more than browse the Web and play videos? Marco
Martin, well-known KDE hacker and basysKom employee, thinks so: "the
fact that people download and use thousands of apps shows that there
is the desire to do something more". He dislikes the way "most mobile
applications feel quite disconnected with each other". Marco believes
this is where KDE's new user interface and application set for touchscreen devices, Plasma Active, can shine.

Figure 1. Plasma Active comes with a selection
of applications, some more ready for touchscreens than others.

Plasma Active takes a new approach to touchscreen devices and tries
to offer more than a set of applications for simple tasks. More than a
desktop or even a notebook computer, a touchscreen device is likely
to be carried around and used in different contexts, for different
purposes. Plasma Active makes use of KDE's Activities, something that
has confused desktop users (see the Activities—a Solution Looking for a
Problem? sidebar) but, the developers believe, makes
sense on tablet devices.

Aaron Seigo, a founding member of the Plasma Active Project and one of
the main drivers behind KDE's Plasma family of user interfaces, hails
Activities as a great step forward, claiming that "many find the ability
to sort their information and applications between different activities
greatly increases the value of the device in their lives". He uses a
personal example: "while on a recent vacation I relied on Activities
to keep track of our itineraries and plans, some work tasks
and to keep up with things back home. I have a few Android tablets,
and none of them would have been nearly as useful."

Activities—a Solution Looking for a Problem?

Since 2008, KDE has been pushing the concept of Activities, with mixed
results. Many users have not been sure of the difference between Activities,
designed to allow division of different types of tasks, and virtual desktops,
which many people use to divide different types of tasks.

The idea is that although virtual desktops provide extra space and some
grouping—for example, you might have different desktops for e-mail, Web,
numerical work and graphics work—Activities provide customized
interfaces for different tasks at different times.

Imagine you are a student at university. You might use virtual
desktops as described above—with e-mail on one and lecture notes
on another. But you might use Activities to differentiate between
your courses, having one Activity for each set of lectures. So you can have a
calculator widget on your desktops for your math lectures Activity,
the periodic table for your chemistry lab Activity and quick access to
your games in your free-time Activity. With its quick switcher and
per-Activity recommendations, Plasma Active takes this concept further,
making your tablet change its configuration
completely at the scroll of the Activities wheel, so you can have it set
up just how you want for every task you experience.

Figure 2. You can customize each Activity with
widgets and switch between them easily using the Activities wheel.

First Impressions

When you launch Plasma Active for the first time (see the Try Plasma Active
Two sidebar for how
to try it), you are presented with what appears to be a fairly standard
KDE desktop. The main things out of place are a panel at the top of
the screen and the lack of an obvious application menu. Two small tabs
halfway up either side of the screen also are not found in other KDE
workspaces. Between them, these three items provide your control of
Plasma Active. Drag the top panel down a little, and you will see a wide,
touch-friendly task bar, with live previews of the running applications
and the Home Screen that effectively minimizes all running programs. Drag
a bit farther down, and you are presented with a wall of application
icons, not unlike those provided on Android or Apple tablets, with a
search box you can use to locate the correct application quickly. So far,
not so very revolutionary.

Try Plasma Active Two

The latest release of Plasma Active is easy to try out. If you already
have a computer running MeeGo or OpenSUSE, you can install the needed
packages. However, a safer and more convenient option is to try one of the
ready-made live images—you always can install them if you decide you
like Plasma Active. Live images on a MeeGo base are provided by basysKom,
while open-slx provides an image built on its OpenSUSE-based Balsam
Professional distribution.

You even can try Plasma Active on ARM devices (such as an Android
tablet) using an image built on Mer, the port of a MeeGo-like system to
the ARM architecture.

The performance of the live images depends on your USB stick and your
tablet device. You can install the software to get better performance,
but that may, of course, overwrite your existing operating system.

As Plasma Active—and tablet devices—become more widespread,
it is likely that many distributions will begin to offer Plasma Active
as a user interface or provide special mobile-optimized distributions
with Plasma Active.

As Aaron Seigo of KDE notes, "a solution only really matters if people
can use it". You also may one day see Plasma Active devices for
sale—the Plasma Active team is "working quite hard on making this a reality
in the near future".

Adapting to Different Tasks

It is the two tabs on the sides of the screen that are unique to
Plasma Active. The tab on the right, when dragged out, reveals a wheel
of Activities, each represented by a thumbnail image. A few selections are
predefined, including "Introduction" that provides some information on
getting started; "Vacation planning", set up for just that; and
"My first
activity", which invites you to make your own. You can delete, customize
or add activities using icons that are visible with the Activity wheel.

Figure 3. You can have an Activity for all the things
you need to do—and for the things you want to do.

Selecting an Activity changes the desktop background and desktop widgets
to those associated with the Activity. Choose the vacation planning
Activity, and you are presented with a picture of a hay field as the
desktop background and have the KDE weather forecast widget and bookmarks
for OpenStreetMap, Wikitravel and a rail operator on your desktop. You
can open a browser and start booking your holiday, but if your child
(or you) suddenly has an overpowering urge to play
Solitaire, you
can just switch to an Activity set up for games. If you check the task
bar by pulling down the top panel, you will see that it shows only the
applications from the current Activity, so your holiday booking in the
vacation planning Activity is safe from little fingers accidentally
closing the browser or upgrading you all to first-class transatlantic
travel. Once your child (or you) have had your game-playing fix, you
can use the Activities wheel to get back to booking your holiday quickly.

Getting Smart with Nepomuk

The tab on the left of the screen reveals Plasma Active's
"Recommendations": links to files, widgets and contacts that might be
relevant to the current activity. This is based on Nepomuk, KDE's semantic
storage technology, which draws links between items based on the context
of their use. Marco explains that this enables "the information stored on
the device by users to be kept in a central place, allowing them to treat
in the same way and display in a coherent way everything, regardless if it
is a file, a contact, a bookmark or information about a location, linking
them together with semantic information". What this means in practice
is that the Recommendations are able to be more than a list of recently
used or most-accessed files, suggesting documents that often are used at
the same time as those presently open or often used within the current
Activity (the recommendations are tailored to each Activity). While
writing this article, it suggested some irrelevant items,
but the system quickly learned to suggest screenshots I had collected and
suggested adding the Linux Journal author guidelines and Plasma Active
Wiki pages to my bookmarks. The idea is that the system learns from its
user and becomes ever more useful over time, and based on my experience,
I give it a cautious thumbs-up.

Figure 4. Plasma Active provides Recommendations of
files and actions that are relevant to the task you are working on.

Nepomuk has, since it was first introduced in KDE software in 2008,
been the target of many complaints about resource usage, something
that is likely to be of even greater concern on a low-powered portable
device. Marco, however, points out that "on a mobile device the stored
data is very small compared to a desktop, and measurements have shown that
with the limited number of items in it, the memory usage stays very
small",
while, of course, using a central store also "avoids the necessity to build
different storage/indexing for every application". Aaron agrees:
"the
devices we currently target are all in the 600MHz to 1GHz range with 256MB
or more of RAM. On these devices, it works acceptably". Nevertheless, the
developers have been working on "numerous optimizations and
improvements",
and Aaron acknowledges there is always the possibility of "stripping out
Nepomuk for some very low-end, in terms of hardware and user interaction,
scenarios". I did not come across any of the slowness that sometimes
accompanies extensive indexing on the desktop.

It's All about the Apps

The basic user interface seems slick and well thought out, and through
Activities, it does offer something different from the competition. However,
a computer is only as good as its applications, and if Plasma Active is
to be a success, KDE must provide a compelling suite of touch-friendly
applications.

Figure 5. The applications that already have been
adjusted for use with Plasma Active, such as the image viewer, work well.

A few "Active" variants of established KDE applications already
are available. These include those that have been largely designed from the
ground up for Plasma Active, such as the Web browser and image viewer,
both of which were easy to use. Some other applications, such as the
media player Bangarang, have received modifications to make them a little
more touch-friendly. There are dedicated Active versions of the Kontact
suite of groupware applications. Each of these are easy to use with a
stubby finger, but their interfaces are so different from their desktop
counterparts that even if you are an experienced Kontact user, you will
find they take a little getting used to. Calligra, KDE's productivity
suite, also is available in an Active version, but it felt slow on the
device I used. However, Calligra's underlying technology already
has been used in the successful FreOffice viewers for Nokia's mobile phones,
so it is likely the performance will improve.

Some other applications, such as Dolphin (the KDE file manager), have not
been adapted for touch-friendly use—and it shows. A similar interface
is used in the Open and Save dialogs of most applications, but these will
all be improved in future versions.

The most essential of applications on a tablet, the on-screen keyboard,
works very well with easy-to-touch buttons and a sensible layout. It
appears when needed, and it can be switched from the bottom to the top of
the screen if desired.

Figure 6. The on-screen keyboard is easy to use and
can be moved out of the way when needed.

Share, Like, Connect

Another new feature in Plasma Active is the presence of Share,
Like and Connect buttons in the top panel. These make it easy to
share content instantly, such as images, to social networks or on-line
storage; "like" things on either social networks or locally (for
example,
bookmarking a page); and connect things together, such as linking a
document or a page to the current Activity so that it always will be
readily available in the future. This way, if you want quick access to an
image, just click the Connect icon to add it as a widget on the desktop
of the present Activity.

Figure 7. You easily can associate a file or Web page
with an Activity by using the Connect button.

Open for Business

Plasma Active has been unusual among KDE projects due to the heavy
involvement of companies from the start. Among these, basysKom has
employed developers to work on Contour, the combination of Activities and
Recommendations at the center of the user experience. Marco states that
"everyone from the community is welcome to join and contribute, just
like any other KDE project—companies are members of the community as
well and are helping in many tasks (also the less fun ones in order to
give to it the level of quality needed for an actual product)". Companies
also are making it easy to try Plasma Active, with live images provided
by basysKom and open-slx (see the Try Plasma Active Two sidebar).

Life after MeeGo

In the past, a large part of KDE's focus in the mobile space has been
on MeeGo-powered devices, particularly those created by Nokia. However,
the decision of Nokia to use Windows as the base for its smartphones
and Intel's subsequent dropping of MeeGo in favor of its collaboration
with Samsung, Tizen, has changed things. These changes do not, however,
unduly concern the KDE developers. Aaron points out that "Plasma Active
is not welded to any one OS and is highly portable", and indeed, there are
"images with OpenSUSE, MeeGo and Mer kernels and userlands beneath the
Plasma Active UI".

ARM devices running Android have proven to be very popular, and Plasma Active
also is targeting some of this hardware, with an ARM-ready image already
available built on software from the Mer Project. But what about Android
itself? It is not presently the most appealing alternative for Marco,
who argues that "Android, while released with an open-source license is
tightly controlled by Google and doesn't leave much room for a developer
community to grow and contribute". He does, however, acknowledge that
Android "is a good platform indeed and we don't exclude some integration
work with it in the future".

There also are possibilities of Plasma Active or related technologies
targeting much more than just tablets. Aaron notes that already "some
are running it on handset-style devices", but that "the current user
experience has been designed with a tablet in mind". He plans,
however, to
start working on "interfaces that are designed specifically for other
form factors, such as set-top boxes and handsets in the future". A key
enabler for this is Plasma's design: "Plasma allows for multiple, and
highly diverse, user interfaces without starting from scratch. Plasma
Desktop, Netbook and now Active for tablets showcases this very nicely:
they are all very different on the surface from each other, but share
nearly all the implementation code beneath."

The Future of Plasma Active

Plasma Active is still young software. Plasma Active Two was released
shortly before this article was written and is the version discussed
here. Plasma Active Three is expected in summer 2012 and "will
be focusing on new major feature and application introductions",
according to Aaron. From a purely end-user perspective, the limited
number of touch-friendly applications means Plasma Active is not ready
yet. Nonetheless, it is well worth trying out and could become compelling
by the time of its third release later this year. It already feels more
polished and complete than any of the MeeGo tablet pre-releases.

There are other reasons to get excited about Plasma Active. For Marco,
the motivation for starting work on Plasma Active had "different reasons,
both purely technological and social ones". The social ones are perhaps
best summed up by Aaron: "right now, there is too much focus on created
devices that serve the owner of the application store and focus on
consumption of new devices just for the sake of the newness of the
device", something he believes has "largely stalled
progress".

Aaron sees a different future for Plasma Active and those who choose
to contribute to or use the software: "We should be looking at how to
support people's lives and in doing so make them better. This needs to be
done in a socially responsible manner, which means free and open-source
software as well as open processes must drive the development. This is
the point and purpose of Plasma Active."